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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The TV Musical Part I: Original Songs

This is part one of a two part post on musical tv moments/episodes. Today we focus on TV shows featuring original songs in advance of tonight's aptly named Glee episode, "Original Song." On Thursday, March 31 we will look at TV performances of well known songs in anticipation of Grey's Anatomy's musical episode, "Song Beneath the Song."

Through its first 37 episodes, Glee featured no original songs, other than a brief number by Rachel about her headband a few weeks back. That ends tonight. Three original songs, "Get it Right," "Loser Like Me," and "Hell to the No," will be performed in tonight's episode. The first two songs have been released, although in full disclosure, as suggested by a handful of critics (most notably Myles McNutt), I have yet to listen to the songs in order to be able to experience them like the judges and Kurt and Blaine do tonight.

But Glee is not the first show to delve into the world of original song writing. Below are some of my favorites...

How I Met Your Mother has penned six original songs since then, but the first one was by far the best. Pehaps it was the element of surprise, or the constant Canadian references, or the rap break, or the robot, but it is hard to top "Let's Go to the Mall"

﻿The lyrics of the Friends hit "Smelly Cat" may not have been quite as clever, but the show got as much out of the song as possible over the course of the series.

﻿Scrubs went above and beyond with a full-out musical episode. Here is the big opening production number:

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﻿Finally, Community, which made a joke in the famous Paintball episode about Glee's lack of original songs, had a couple songs of its own, including the catchy "Getting Rid of Britta"